Looking into Cormac McCarthy

Hell Symbolism?

I almost wrote about the fires before but wasn't sure enough. Now my ideas are connecting up with some new symbolism.

When they were in the desert it seemed like every fire was blown downward powerfully by the constant wind, such that the flames and showers of sparks were whipped down and stretched way out across the ground. It felt like some kind of symbolic lava, which might be hell symbolism, as if the very desert floor itself is riven with streams of ephemeral lava (but only in close vicinity to the Glanton gang, because the fires were usually theirs).

Now in chapter 10 there's a long story being told to the kid by Tobin about Judge Holden, who apparently possesses all skills to an amazing degree, including being the best dancer in any group he's a part of and far and away the best violinist as well as knowing every language they encounter and all manner of knowledge concerning biology and geology and gunsmithing and anything else you could name. As he traveled with the gang he would be always engaged in some manner of experiment or study, at times visiting caves to study the habits of bats or picking up rocks and subjecting them to chemical tests. And he writes it all down in little notebooks. It was the Judge who told everybody that the earth is round like an egg and had molten lava at its core (none of them knew that), and that volcanoes were just outbursts of that molten core to the surface.

Tobin, while spinning this (chapter-long?) tale, said in his opinion the center of the earth is hell itself, and wherever a lava stream touches, the surface becomes an extension of it.

Well, that immediately connected up with the ghost-lava flows that all their fires became. It literally feels like they're carrying a vision of hell with them wherever they travel. Or they're seeing glimpses of it all around them.

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An analysis of a section of the prose. It's the exact same passage read in the video I posted just recently. He first reads the entire passage, so I started it right after that, when he begins his analysis. If you want to hear the passage, either scroll back to the beginning or listen to the video near the bottom of the previous page. It's the last video posted on page 2.

At this point I haven't listened to much of his analysis, I'll do that and add some comments below.

Ok wow—what to say after that? A good analysis of the prose style. Several things I had noticed but hadn't tried to figure out yet—on a first read-through I mostly just enjoy the ride and soak up as much as I can. Then I start to look for things on a second reading. But of course sometimes you notice things immediately, like all the symbolism connected with the Void and hell at the bottom of the last page.

I like that he immediately talks about the showing. I had mentioned it before, that I wasn't sure quite what he was doing, but it felt like very active showing. Now I see exactly what it is (and it's something I often do, I just had never tried to put it into words).

I don't remember if I posted about this earlier on this thread or not, but the sentence structure—the long sentences joined by so many conjunctions—is in imitation of the King James Bible.

And yeah, I had noticed his way of cleverly inserting words like clove (which recalls cloven, which recalls Satan) or spliced, which sounds like sliced. Words that recall violent acts. There's a lot of violence in the landscape—rocks upthrusting and exploding and the like. One thing I can say that he didn't seem to understand—a seep is an area where water seeps up through the ground. Something like a spring, but it doesn't have a nice clear opening to emerge from, it just has to filter its way up through the soil. There are several out in the woods behind my house, and when I traced the nearest stream to see if I could find its source, it begins at a seep on fairly high ground. Actually several that all run downhill and feed into the stream.

I just bought three more books relating to McCarthy—

• Selected Short Stories of William Faulkner
• The Complete Short Stories Of Ernest Hemingway
• Cormac McCarthy, Philosophy and the Physics of the Damned

Hemingway and Faulkner are two of his important influences, recommended in the video at the top of every page of this blog entry. I checked the Sample of each book before deciding to buy them. I really haven't read much by any of the important modernist authors, aside from what was assigned in school.

As for the book about McCarthy, it appeals to me because every time I see a reductivist summation, like 'He's a materialist,' or 'He's an atheist,' or 'He's spiritual,' or 'Christian,' it galls me. He's all of those things, or rather they're all included in his work, but he definitely can't be reduced to any of them. He contains multitudes (we all do in the unconscious), and his work merges these attitudes, despite some of them seeming to be contradictory. The author of that book gets it, and I really like what I was able to read on Amazon.

He also says McCarthy (I actually just wrote McCormac!) merges philosophy and literature in such a seamless way that they can't be separated. In other words, he's not a novelist who discourses in his stories about philosophy, nor is he a philosopher with a complete system of philosophy who writes novels that illustrate it, like Ayn Rand. He writes novels that contain powerful philosophical ideas, but somehow indirectly (not sure that's quite right). In fact it reminds me of what I just posted about in my most recent entry on the Poetry thread—a poet who said he doesn't want to be known as a religious poet because that's a reductive title, and also he doesn't write theology or dogma in poetic form, but instead he writes poetry about those things.

Writing Emotion, According to Hemingway and McCarthy

I read the first Hemingway story in that book on Amazon (the whole thing is part of the Sample). And of course I've been reading a lot of McCarthy lately. Neither one of them directly writes emotion. All the stuff I studied recently about how to write emotion (when I was looking into all the Deep POV stuff)* is just nonexistent in their work. Hemingway lets you know what a character's emotion is indirectly, through subtext in dialogue or through subtle clues in the narration, which is another form of subtext. But at no point was there anything like 'His gut tightened and the hackles rose on the back of his neck. He felt a flush of heat rise into his face as he filled with shame.' McCarthy maintains an even greater emotional distance from his characters than Hemingway—on the surface level they seem not to have any emotions or vulnerabilities at all. But he does allow some to come through in subtext, in dialogue or in the extremely vivid descriptions of the landscape.

I think directly writing about emotion is pretty common in women's writing and in romance novels and the like. But Hemingway and McCarthy are tough hombres, they aren't the kind of guys who are going to wring their hands and say to a friend "Let's talk about our feelings." Guys don't do that. I certainly don't, and I'm not all that tough of a guy. It just doesn't come naturally to us, or maybe at all, without things getting really awkward. I had a nagging feeling the entire time I was studying that stuff that this isn't quite right, though at the time I just thought I needed to modify it somewhat. But I really like the way these authors handle it (Hemingway and McCarthy). Indirect. Offscreen. If you do that right you can get across volumes, and it's actually a lot more powerful than just spelling everything out. Plus, like I said above, it's the way guys actually communicate their feelings to each other. Meanwhile women want to talk it all out in very literal terms.

(When I say guys I refer to the ones who guzzle beer or maybe whiskey, maybe own a gun or several, or a few knives, or work out, or any number of other guy things. I know not all men are like this. And I also know many women are.)

* I noticed while studying Deep POV that all the books and articles I found were written by women, and one of them even straight up said that the vast preponderance of writers who use it are women.

Noodling to Perfection

I ran across this tidbit last night, and I don't remember if it was in the Cambridge Guide to Cormac McCarthy or in one of the videos, but it's worth noting here. Apparently the various drafts of his books can be read, and by paying attention you can trace how each line, each passage evolved through the drafting process. The point I want to stress is how carefully and meticulously he would re-write each section until he had it just perfect. I suppose that's the kind of tenacity it takes to turn yourself into one of the great American novelists. And it's also undoubtedly why it took him the better part of a decade to write Blood Meridian.

It probably was in the video I posted last night, he did cover the idea of drafting.*

* Actually I think it was in one of the Write Conscious videos. I've seen a lot of them. The guy is basically me, but in California Yoga surfer-boy form. It's uncanny how many of my interests he shares.

I've seen people say things like "In McCarthy's stories Mankind is irredeemably corrupt and violent." I'm not sure that's entirely true. I mean, I certainly haven't seen a morally decent character yet in the three books I've tackled (well, maybe the kid and his dad in The Road). But then the kind of characters he writes about are the scum of the earth—morally rudderless, devastated, nasty types who tend to find each other on the margins of society, in gangs or biker bars or the equivalent. Nasty, despicable sadistic murderers and the like. So far I haven't run across a book by him that's set in a sunny English countryside or a nice suburban neighborhood. Of course those places have their despicable people too, but there are also some pretty decent ones. So far I'm not convinced his message is that Mankind is entirely morally corrupt, more like that there are quite a few among us who are, and that it's a sort of disease that can be transferred if you get caught in the net. I could be wrong, maybe he really does believe all people are horrible murderers and rapists and worse, I suppose time will tell. Or maybe I'm just hopelessly naive and innocent. Or maybe he was just fascinated by that type, or thought it made for good novel material. It does seem to run straight through the modern novel and art in general.

Or the message could be something like—

If you think there are a lot of decent people, maybe you just don't know them well enough.
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That is true, even the best people have their terrible days, or if you see them under intense pressure you'll be shocked by what they're capable of (and that includes yourself). But some people are like that all the time, and some most of the time. There's a difference between a normally decent person pushed to extremes and somebody who revels in making the people around them suffer. This gets to empathy, or the psychological dimension of Agreeableness (one of the Big Five personality traits as they're known). Some people just have none. They make great lawyers and security guards and the like. Not very good friends though, or family members.

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Another analysis, this one more in-depth. It's a 3-parter. I wish there wasn't music over the voice.

Comment from under the video, made by @judgeholden6761:

"I think the book contains only scenes about pure survival and reactive violence, but in truth, the book is completely a neo-biblical myth about how if you don't try to heroically reach out to higher purpose in a world of survival and violence, then your life will be a nightmare and your soul will die."
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Sounds about right to me. McCarthy tends to write about those people who don't try or aren't capable. Or, another way to put it, the damned. Hence why there's so much hell symbolism throughout. The kingdom of heaven is within you—or, conversely, the kingdom of hell. They aren't places we go after death, they're the way we live out our lives here on earth.

The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

I was debating whether to start a new thread about Hemingway for this, but I'm going to just do it here. It's only nominally connected to McCarthy though, just because Hemingway is one of his big influences.

That first story in the Hemingway book—the one I read yesterday on Amazon—is called The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber. That link opens the Sample for the book. I can't find a way to open it right on the story, but if you scroll down a ways it's after all the prefaces.

Spoilers by the way. If you're interested, go read it real quick and then come back.

It blew my mind a little, because the story covers the same arc as The Beastseekers, about someone finding their courage. A young American couple are out in the bush in Africa on a hunting safari, having hired an English Great White Hunter as their guide. Right off the bat we discover the lead character, Francis Macomber, has already chickened out when face to face with a lion he was supposed to shoot. Instead he ran away and the guide had to shoot it. Or did it get away? I forget. But the important thing is that his wife has lost all respect for him now. She sleeps with the virile guide and makes it crystal clear to her husband that from now on she'll be humiliating him endlessly in front of everyone they know. They're already both aware that they won't be ending the marriage—something about neither one has any other prospects at this stage of their lives. And I mean, she really digs her claws in and revels in the power of shaming and humiliating him. It's clear she intends to destroy his reputation and his very soul.

This causes such a powerful disturbance in him, such immense pressure, that he suddenly finds his courage. He leaps out of the jeep while it's still in motion and fires at a charging buffalo (probably seeing her face on it). One veers toward him and he stands his ground fearlessly and shoots it. And then his wife shoots him in the back of the head, from the car. She had a rifle just in case (and ironically it's called a Mannlicher).

The true arc of the story isn't about courage though, it's about honor. Francis might have been a coward (actually it's revealed that many people quail on the first time facing a dangerous beast and then get over it), but he didn't try to hide the fact. He accepted it, felt bad about it, and wanted to try to do better. And the guide had honor. He said no way would he ever talk smack about Francis, or any of his clients. It would be a horrible violation of his position as guide. But the woman had no courage and no honor. The moment she realized her husband had become a different man now—a real man, as opposed to the coward she thought of him as (and largely because of her nasty tyranny ploy) she realized it wasn't going to go the way she had planned. She wasn't going to be lording it over him and crushing the life out of him day by day. It was going to be the other way around. He would now be returning home the conquering hero, and very obviously a changed man. Everyone would be able to see it in his bearing and his new ability to face people down. It's a big change, it affects everything about you. He had become one of the magnificent beasts, like the ones he was shooting, and he died the same way they did, with a bullet in the head. Apparently he had never been in the right kind of situation, or maybe had never had a mentor in masculinity like the guide turned out to be, and had just not yet discovered his courage. It takes a monumental moment for that to happen (well, sometimes). And now that she had shown her true colors, she couldn't backpedal and pretend like she didn't really mean it. Too late for that. Now he would probably divorce her. He would have new prospects.

The guide maintained the same strict code of honor with her that he did with his clients—he told her he would never tell a soul about what she had done (even as she denied doing it), but he made sure to let her know, just between the two of them, that he knew and she knew she was a coward and a murderess. He at least made her face that about herself before she went back and began the life of lies about what had happened to her poor husband. It just occurred to me—I wonder if both men suffered terrible shooting accidents on that trip?

I've been offline for about a week, but I kept writing in my own journal. Here's what I wrote concerning McCarthy and Blood Meridian, I think a day or two after that perevious entry:

I'm Done
I think I’m done with McCarthy. Almost halfway through Blood Meridian and suddenly I just don’t want to read anymore.

There’s no dimension of character interaction or character growth or even of character. None of them have an inner life at all, nor do they react no matter what happens. People can die horribly or be mutilated right next to a bunch of these guys and nobody says a word or bats an eye. They’re like mannikins, they just sit there with no expression on their faces. They don’t care about anything. As far as I can tell every character (at least all the main ones) are psychopaths, sociopaths, sadists, torturers, rapists and/or murderers with absolutely no emotion, no empathy, and no soul. These are not characters.

I love the descriptions of nature. It’s more than that really, it’s nature in its greatest splendor and glory, with cosmic forces blasting through it. But it isn’t enough to make up for such dull lifeless characters.

This is exactly the kind of character Child of God was about. It seems different in The Road, but the situation and the setting are so bleak it almost feels the same. People who actually care, but in a dead world? Hopelessness. Bleakness. And all the other characters are the same kind of empty soulless automatons.

Yeah, I think I’m done.

For a good week or so I didn't read any more, but then a couple days ago from sheer boredom mostly (not being online) I picked it up and started reading again, despite what I had said about there not being any real character interaction or in fact characters. The entire war party is treated as a single character for the most part, and I suppose it does interact with other characters, by massacring them and scalping them by the dozens or hundreds. God, it just keeps getting worse though, referring to the insane violence and mass murder. I've reached a point now where basically the Glanton gang has become the equivalent of the Apache war party that was read aloud in a video clip a page or so back. They're utter savages, reveling in the massacre, but showing no emotion or mercy at any time. Like human sharks playing a numbers game. This is incredibly bleak stuff. I mean, what a horrible thing to do, putting us in a scalping gang and following their actions as they rampage across the Southwest.

Was Hemingway Anima-Possessed?
Just got Collected Shorts of Hemingway and read the 1st story, Francis Macomber. Wrote about it on the WF blog yesterday.

What I’m thinking about now are the models of Hemingway-esque masculinity I’m aware of:

• Harlan
• The Sterling Hayden character in the Philip Marlowe movie (The Long Goodbye)
• What (little) I know about Hemingway himself
• The beginnings of a few other Hemingway stories I read last night in the dark back yard
• And doubtless a few other examples I’ve witnessed in life of the Hemingway type

All the models I know of confirm my suspicion—that Hemingway was so masculine because he lacked a connection to the internal feminine (the Anima).

As a result he was Anima-possessed much of the time. Plus he needed women in his life, because that was his only contact with the feminine. It all fits perfectly with what I’ve heard about him on some of the Art of Darkness podcasts.

From the few stories I’ve at least begun to read (most of them don’t appeal to me) he seems to write about men very much like himself—a masculine adventurer and world-traveler, usually in conversation (quarreling) with a woman who seems to want to hem him in or to destroy or diminish or limit his freedom and masculinity. He seems to use these women as stand-ins for his own Anima, so he can argue with it, blame it for his problems, etc.

I learned that Francis Macomber was based on a real safari he took with his current wife where he hired a celebrated English guide and Great White Hunter. Of course Macomber wasn’t based very much on Hemingway, he was a coward who found his courage on the safari. It was probably a way of illustrating a situation so he could really go all out on the woman being threatened by his masculinity and just murdering him.

It also seems like Hemingway was prone to sudden childish outbursts, like the character in the The Long Goodbye (played by Sterling Hayden). It’s a type.

Here's a clip with the very Hemingway-esque character. He's even a writer:

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Focused and Peripheral Attention
This fits in peripherally here. Maybe I'll move it later, but for now I just need to write it fast before it's gone.

I had a burst of inspiration about the two kinds of attention we have, that are somewhat analogous to focused and peripheral vision. Ergo focused and peripheral attention.

I wrote a little about this the last time I wrote about the sudden nature-trance that sometimes overtakes me, usually when I'm out walking, and usually on a street or (more often) a parking lot. In fact usually the same parking lot.

I thought about this some time later as I sat in my back yard watching the breeze stir the millions of leaves (my back yard is basically the woods). When it was still winter I bought a combination parka/sleeping bag thing, basically a sleeping bag with sleeves attached so you get some arm mobility while wearing it, and I would sit out in the back yard late in the night (after midnight) doing meditation. But I never got the nature-trance at those times. Then when warmer weather arrived I would sit out there or walk in the woods in the daytime, and a few times it struck me, and I paid close attention to what was going on, both in the trees and inside of me.

What became clear is that it's necessary to see the leaves shifting gently. And not just that, it's even more about the light striking them, and the way the wind makes them shift. It sets up a flashing effect, because many of the leaves (hundreds of them at a time) will angle upward or downward such that a moment ago they were reflecting brilliant sunlight into my eyes, and suddenly they're tilted so the dark sides are showing now (the undersides). It happens when the wind blows with enough power to really stir them, but gently. Not to whip branches around or anything. The leaves are all dancing gently, tilting up and down, and that flashing effect is happening all over my visual field. All together thousands of leaves dancing, playing games with the light. An immense overall shimmering.

I believe it shifted me from focused attention into overall, peripheral attention.

I guess I should blather about this a bit. Talking about the eyes (which are not exactly the same as your attention)—your focal area is very small, much smaller than you think it is. They say it's about the size of a quarter, but I'm not sure if that's a quarter fifty feet in front of you, or held at arm's length. Either way it's pretty small. Actually now that I said that, it must be at arm's length—fifty feet away it would be about a square millimeter in real estate. We think our focal area is much bigger (in fact most people freak out when told it's so small) because it's constantly moving around, and our visual cortex does such a good job of merging all those flickering glances together seamlessly into what feels like one unified field that we imagine we can see an area at least as big as a catcher's mitt, or even bigger in front of us. It's all an illusion, as so much of our perception really is. The brain makes it all feel fluid and continuous.

Anyway, everything else we see is peripheral, which I've heard is in black and white, but I've sat out there and played around with my vision, and I don't believe that, Even way off to the sides, when Ilm not moving my eyes around, there's still color. Maybe the color is reduced? I'm not sure. And it's been a while now since I did all this. I should try it again and double-check. It's night now, maybe tomorrow?

So, the point is that once again, the brain stitches the focal and peripheral visual areas together seamlessly, and sort of lets you expand your focal area by moving your eyes around constantly, so it feels like you can see a much larger focal area than you actually can.

Ok, to switch now to the attention-field rather than the visual one. It's a different thing, except that it does deal with what you see, but also what you hear, and I suspect dark areas (unknown areas) are filled in by memory and imagination. For instance, if I see my shed, I know what the other side of it looks like, and that memory fills in the blank, such that it's almost as if I can see the other side of it. Not really, but very subtly I think there's al effect of that going on, at least sometimes. I should check on that too. That part is only my own theory so far. But for example, if I'm inside the house and suddenly hear a loud sound that seems like it came from inside the garage, I know what the inside of it looks like, even though I can't see it right now. Plus I can imagine possibly scenarios—maybe that damn raccoon got in again and dumped something over. This is what I mean by memory and imagination filling in the gaps. But that filling-in of course is very low resolution and not at all clear, it's more like possibilities rather than clear information.

This is what I mean when I talk about the attention field. In fact, if you smell something unusual that seems like it doesn't belong, that will suddenly make you wonder about what it is. If it smells like fresh hot popcorn, you might run through a number of possible scenarios, probably in the unconscious (the lightning-quick part of the mind that's outside of your conscious control) and imagine that maybe a neighbor just made popcorn. Or maybe a car pulled up and somebody got out of it with a bag of popcorn. All of this is the attention field, with some help form memory and imagination.

What happens when suddenly I see thousands of leaves flashing dark/light all over my visual field is I shift from focused attention (or mostly focused) to mostly peripheral attention.

And that makes sense to me, because many times I've read that in mediation it[s good to use something like peripheral attention to expand your awareness out around yourself in a diffused, unfocused way. Become vaguely aware of the space around you, the sounds and smells, the things you can see, etc. I won't say it's when you make that shift into peripheral (unfocused) attention that the trance takes you over. I don't know, but for some reason peripheral, unfocused attention is important in meditation. I think it[s the shift away from focused attention that does the trick. Because I think focused attention is dealt with by the conscious mind and peripheral attention by the unconscious.

Whew! There it is.

I wrote that incredibly fast—my fingers were stumbling all over themselves, because I wanted to try to keep up with the ideas as they formed, so I have a lot of fixin' to do, Plus this is going to have to be cut in half, no way will it all fir on one post. But I feel like this is important, I had much of the raw data in my head but this is the first time I though through it all in a way that makes sense, or seems to. It's a theory, and I'll try to test it when I can and update this.

I thought it sort-of fits in this blog thread because of the strong nature theme throughout Blood Meridian.